At Home on Hendrik

With all the hard work we’ve been doing over the past four years, the vast majority of it has been of the vital and urgent sort, so to be able to do some purely aesthetic work on the boat felt pretty nice.

We’re planning on doing a full topside paint when we go into drydock next year, but the anchor winch area has been bugging me recently with its rust, and I could no longer ignore it.

So last weekend I went at it with a wirebrush and a screwdriver (the latter to get the big bubbles of paint off when the wirebrush couldn’t cut it), and at first it looked worse, not better:

Then I got out the white paint and gave everything a good coat, including the two turning wheels next to it, the spiral winch itself, and even as far up the pile as I could reach (though somehow my pile photo has gone missing).

As luck would have it, I did the white paint on one of the hottest days of the year, so the paint dried almost as soon as it touched the hot metal, meaning I could do two coats in about 45 minutes.

Then I managed to borrow a tin of “Post box red” paint from the neighbours, and I touched up the winch spiral and the ends on the port side:

This stuff was great – it looked fantastic after only one coat, and gave a really satisfying, glossy, deep red finish. I must get a photo of the label before the neighbours are off, as I’d buy this over Hammerite any day.

I still want to finish the job with a similar touch-up session of black paint, but I’ll need to wait for another sunny weekend for that (so, ooh 2013?).